Another clause of the Declaration, as Jefferson first wrote it, made George responsible for the slave trade in America with all its horrors and crimes.

We may doubt whether that not too enlightened monarch had even more than vaguely heard of the slave trade.

This phase of the attack upon him was too much for the slave owners of the South and the slave traders of New England, and the clause was struck out.
Nearly fourscore and ten years later, Abraham Lincoln, at a supreme crisis in the nation's life, told in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, what the Declaration of Independence meant to him.

"I have never," he said, "had a feeling politically which did not spring from the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence"; and then he spoke of the sacrifices which the founders of the Republic had made for these principles.

He asked, too, what was the idea which had held together the nation thus founded.